flicky1991 wrote:Why choose between edgelord and hyperedgelord? Some people are bipartite.

Why choose between edge and node? These once-thought-to-be-binary concepts are now recognized as fluid. Maybe it started out as cis-edge or cis-node, but changed with maturity and self-realization.

I think "a spectrum from edge to node" is very close-minded. Rather, there's a vector space with nodity in one direction and edginess in another. As a result, you can project a graph in a way that all the nodges become nodes and edges....unless there's a ménage à trois.

Had to look up what an edgelord was. Can someone explain to me how this is different from being a troll, and if there is no difference, why we needed a new word for it? I mean, I'm all for making up new words to describe new ideas, but when you make up a new word for something we already had a perfectly good word for, then you're just being an edgelord.

TV4Fun wrote:but when you make up a new word for something we already had a perfectly good word for, then you're just being an edgelord.

Well, for starters, this is a completely incorrect usage of the word (and would also be incorrect usage of "trolling"). To be honest, I'm not sure how you got the idea that it's even remotely synonymous with being a troll. They describe very different concepts. Trolling, in its original application, tended to be about subtly baiting a reaction, often by acting in a believably dense fashion, although once the term went from internet slang to mainstream it lost all nuance and tends to be applied to anything and everything that annoys someone, in the same way that "meme" has come to be synonymous with "a joke" or "a funny picture". Even then, the incredibly broad mainstream usage is still quite a bit distinct from being an edgelord.

Conversely to actual trolling, edgelords are anything but subtle. They seek to offend people by using the most shocking, scandalous methods they can. They derive a sense of badass self-identity from being cool enough to buck society's trends, such as not calling people n*****s and f*****s. It makes them feel as if they have a wild streak, like they can't be tamed by society. Of course, this is absolutely ridiculous and immature, and they tend to be the subject of much-deserved ridicule. 4chan is a breeding ground for this type of behaviour, especially /b/, where this type of person gets off on not being offended by offensive things. Not into pedophilia? Well, that's just a "normie filter" - you're just too "PC" if literally anything can offend you. You might (or might not be) familiar with the propagation of shock images like goatse in the '00s, which was largely a result of this childish mentality.

"salt" in what sense? Because "salty" to mean angry or irritated is most of a century older than 4chan.

Bridge Troll wrote:↶They seek to offend people by using the most shocking, scandalous methods they can. They derive a sense of badass self-identity from being cool enough to buck society's trends, such as not calling people n*****s and f*****s. It makes them feel as if they have a wild streak, like they can't be tamed by society. Of course, this is absolutely ridiculous and immature, and they tend to be the subject of much-deserved ridicule.

Yeah, while the term may sometimes be applied overbroadly, this is also my understanding of it. People who think it's ~cool~ to be contrarian about basic decency and respect.

Unless stated otherwise, I do not care whether a statement, by itself, constitutes a persuasive political argument. I care whether it's true.---If this post has math that doesn't work for you, use TeX the World for Firefox or Chrome

"salt" in the sense that I've heard it from chan-affiliated subhuman garbage seems to be in some connotation of "tears" (which of course are salty). usage like "lotta salt in here".

i mostly hate it for its application against anyone unhappy with the results of the 2016 election, and so associate its use with the kind of filthy who would be happy with that kind of thing.

and strange that "edgelord" seems, if you're all correct here, to describe exactly the kind of communities i associate with the use of it. (i.e. it seems to be a word to describe the very people i've heard using it against others).

then again, i have noticed a trend of there being like a... mirror-chan(?) culture on the internet, of people who hate chan culture for its contents and yet somehow smell just like it in their presentation. so maybe it's not that surprising.

i saw a video the other day of some guy confronted at a white supremacist rally who literally took off his costume (stripped down to his pants) and put his hands up and claimed not to be "really a white supremacist", and when pressed on what he was doing there said that "it's just kinda fun, y'know? it's a joke. just saying like, 'white power!' and stuff" (paraphrased from memory). so that's an edgelord? (assuming he's not just covering his ass)

Pfhorrest wrote:i saw a video the other day of some guy confronted at a white supremacist rally who literally took off his costume (stripped down to his pants) and put his hands up and claimed not to be "really a white supremacist", and when pressed on what he was doing there said that "it's just kinda fun, y'know? it's a joke. just saying like, 'white power!' and stuff" (paraphrased from memory). so that's an edgelord? (assuming he's not just covering his ass)

That's a perfect example. It is indeed common for edgelords to use rhetoric like this specifically because it's among the most offensive things they can do rather than because they truly believe it. Of course, this behaviour is still incredibly racist even with that excuse, and many edgelords do cross over from using it as offensive rhetoric to genuinely becoming extremists (supremacists or otherwise) because it becomes normal to them after inhabiting the cesspool of their kind long enough. 4chan's /k/ and /pol/ are the biggest examples of this. They're basically political boards filled with people saying the most outrageously offensive things they can day after day after day, in what is essentially a cry out for approval from others like them, and in that environment the things they're saying no longer sound outrageous to them but become typical. With sane voices driven from the discussion by such behaviour, it simply becomes an echo chamber for these extremist ideas, and these people see all of their political news through this incredibly distorted filter.

Although I'm constantly in marvel at the incredible access to information the internet has provided, it's also quite disturbing in the ways it is changing society itself. It's enabled people who would otherwise be social outcasts, that would normally face pressure from society to behave in more acceptable ways, to instead bond and build an identity together around being social outcasts, on an unprecedented scale. In some ways, this was an incredibly good thing - LGBTQ+ people were one of the types of social outcasts who were able to build a greater sense of community identity through the internet - but in other ways quite bad, and I strongly believe it's what's led to the increasing level of polarisation in politics.

late 2016 I came up with a hypothesis that the internet is doing for what you might call "mental disease" (not meant as a synonym of mental illness, but of harmful memes, in the actual, Dawkins sense of the word "meme") what the network of connected cities did for physical diseases in the ancient Old World.

It used to be that if a disease (like a virus or bacterium) was too deadly or too virulent, it would just wipe out the entire population it arose in and die out, because those populations were small and isolated. People lived in little groups very far from each other. Big cities alone just meant that more people could die quickly in such a sudden destructive outbreak because more people were connected closer together.

But when you got big, connected networks of big cities, what should have been a population-destroying superbug could spread from one city it had just about wiped out to all the connected ones, then mutate there and spread right back to reinfect the survivors of the original outbreak in the first city, and bounced back and forth between all of these dense and tightly interconnected populations until they developed into super-plagues.

When the Columbian Exchange happened, New World peoples died of Old World diseases but not the other way around because the Old World had had these terrible incubating conditions for plagues while the New World hadn't.

Memetically, the old sparse population is analogous to random people ranting at bars. It's hard for ideas to spread far or quickly, so the rest of the world is insulated from the little pockets of crazy that pop up everywhere all the time just by virtue of not being in contact with anybody in those little pockets of crazy.

But now with everybody on the internet, every crazy stupid destructive hateful idea can spread far and wide across the whole world and echo back and forth mutating into... well, 4chan. fucking 4chan is the goddamn memetic equivalent of the Black Death.

I feel like some people, I don't know exactly how best to demarcate them but I'd loosely say people who "grew up with the old internet", seem to be largely immunized to a lot of this shit. We know that everyone on the internet is either lying or insane and you can't believe anything you read. But then everyone and their grandma is suddenly connected to that cesspit and they don't fucking know that you shouldn't believe Hillary Clinton is running a Satanic sex cult out of a pizza parlor, I mean it was printed(sic) on the internet, it must be true. Those people are the poor Native Americans whose poor minds are being destroyed by the memetic diseases that have been festering in the figurative pools of animal shit on the internet.

I never really got emotionally bothered by politics before, even when people I didn't approve of were doing things I didn't approve of with power they shouldn't have had. I think the big difference with Trump is that it feels like that kind of explicitly antirational purposefully bullshit 4chanism is suddenly no longer just idiots on the internet its best to ignore, but "validated" by the power structures of the real world. I don't hate 4chan for supporting Trump and Trumplike things; I hate him and those things because they're what those kind of infectiously-crazy people support.

I don't think you're wrong there at all. Boiling it down (forgive me as I'm largely restating your post in a way that's easier for me to wrap my head around), historically crazy ideas mostly died with individual crazies. Sometimes a small group of crazies would accumulate and the crazy would bounce back and forth between them, becoming increasingly crazy, but eventually the crazies would become crazy enough to isolate themselves from everyone around them and could spread no further, eventually eradicating themselves - eg. the Jonestown incident.

The internet has changed this. Crazies now have unlimited access to other crazies for which their crazy ideas to spread, incubate, and evolve into even crazier ideas. People who grew up witnessing this as it happened became immunized to it - some participated in it themselves, while others were simply adjacent to the byproducts of this during their time on the internet and became used to ignoring it. But now these crazy incubations, that would historically die out among their kind for being too crazy, are suddenly being spread to the whole world as people who weren't involved with the internet during the initial incubation period become increasingly connected to the internet. The crazy ideas are lent non-crazy authenticity to people who don't know better simply by virtue of being published in articles on the internet, and are actually affecting people's political beliefs in, well, crazy ways.

Pfhorrest wrote:late 2016 I came up with a hypothesis that the internet is doing for what you might call "mental disease" (not meant as a synonym of mental illness, but of harmful memes, in the actual, Dawkins sense of the word "meme") what the network of connected cities did for physical diseases in the ancient Old World...

I think that's actually very insightful, and probably dead on. And we don't play the part of the organism, but of cells that make up the organism - liver cells, stomach cells, skin cells.... We need antibodies!

Jose

Order of the Sillies, Honoris Causam - bestowed by charlie_grumbles on NP 859 * OTTscar winner: Wordsmith - bestowed by yappobiscuts and the OTT on NP 1832 * Ecclesiastical Calendar of the Order of the Holy Contradiction * Please help addams if you can. She needs all of us.

Funny how so many people seem to have the wrong idea about the word "edgelord" (outside of comic context).

The core use of the word has almost exclusively violent connotations. Look up the character Reaper from Overwatch, he's an edgelord played to a deliberately comic degree of seriousness, hell even his name alone is a perfect example (my own handle would be as well, were it not written backwards and therefor made much subtler and nuanced)

The other even older meme example is the sonic OC "Coldsteel the Hedgehog", which also happens to be where the meme phrase "nothing personnel(sic) kid" comes from

As for the religion thing, usually that's another meme reference. The Fedora-tipping, trenchcoat-wearing, katana-wielding atheist. It's not so much that atheism itself is edgy as people are simply using the connection to a meme as an insult. "If you are X, you are also Y and Z because I said so and I'm going to insult you for Z", that's basically how it works.

Pfhorrest wrote:i saw a ... guy ... who literally took off his costume (stripped down to his pants) and ... that's an edgelord? (assuming he's not just covering his ass)

Heh. Stripped down to his pants, was just covering his ass.

Bridge Troll wrote:It's enabled people who would otherwise be social outcasts, that would normally face pressure from society to behave in more acceptable ways, to instead bond and build an identity together around being social outcasts, on an unprecedented scale. In some ways, this was an incredibly good thing - LGBTQ+ people were one of the types of social outcasts who were able to build a greater sense of community identity through the internet - but in other ways quite bad, and I strongly believe it's what's led to the increasing level of polarisation in politics.

"{Boris Johnson}'s only saying what 90% of the population believe." - some annoying prat on the same bus as me, recently.

Pfhorrest wrote:late 2016 I came up with a hypothesis that the internet is doing for what you might call "mental disease" (not meant as a synonym of mental illness, but of harmful memes, in the actual, Dawkins sense of the word "meme") what the network of connected cities did for physical diseases in the ancient Old World.

... But now with everybody on the internet, every crazy stupid destructive hateful idea can spread far and wide across the whole world and echo back and forth mutating into... well, 4chan. fucking 4chan is the goddamn memetic equivalent of the Black Death.

Memetics borrows from the theory of Darwinian evolution. It suggests that memes compete, reproduce and evolve just as genes do. Only the strongest survive. So memes fiercely vie for space and advantages in our brains and behaviors. The ones that succeed through widespread imitation have best evolved for repetition and communication. A meme is not controllable by any one individual – many people can simultaneously serve as hosts for it.

A wagon with spoked wheels carries not only grain or freight from place to place; it carries the brilliant idea of a wagon with spoked wheels from mind to mind.

What causes one meme to replicate more successfully than another? Some researchers say that memes develop characteristics called “Good Tricks” to provide them with competitive advantages, including:

being genuinely useful to a human host; being easily imitated by human brains; and answering questions that the human brain finds of interest.

I'd have linked the video where I saw it but search results were all "20 funniest one-liners" and that kind of trash.

On the good news side, antibodies are transferrable.

"... and airliners, with whatever that stuff is that they spray out that lingers in the air for however long ...""Contrails? That's just water.""Water?""Yes. They burn hydrocarbons and make CO2 and H2O, water, which cools down and condenses into clouds.""Oh."

"... and airliners, with whatever that stuff is that they spray out that lingers in the air for however long ...""Contrails? That's just water.""Water?""Yes. They burn hydrocarbons and make CO2 and H2O, water, which cools down and condenses into clouds.""Oh."

Sometimes, it works.

And here I thought it was the result of disturbing saturated air, causing the water vapor already present to condense out.

sotanaht wrote:Funny how so many people seem to have the wrong idea about the word "edgelord" (outside of comic context).

The core use of the word has almost exclusively violent connotations. Look up the character Reaper from Overwatch, he's an edgelord played to a deliberately comic degree of seriousness, hell even his name alone is a perfect example (my own handle would be as well, were it not written backwards and therefor made much subtler and nuanced)

The other even older meme example is the sonic OC "Coldsteel the Hedgehog", which also happens to be where the meme phrase "nothing personnel(sic) kid" comes from

As for the religion thing, usually that's another meme reference. The Fedora-tipping, trenchcoat-wearing, katana-wielding atheist. It's not so much that atheism itself is edgy as people are simply using the connection to a meme as an insult. "If you are X, you are also Y and Z because I said so and I'm going to insult you for Z", that's basically how it works.

"Edge" can essentially be boiled down to "violence as an identity".

I actually started writing about "edge" in my original explanation post, citing the videogame Shadow the Hedgehog as an example, so, you know, I get it. However, while writing it, I realised that the connection between "edge/edginess" and "edgelord" is rather tenuous and opted to omit that. Nobody really calls Shadow the Hedgehog an edgelord, they just call it edge or edgy. At most, both terms have a root meaning that's something like "trying too hard to be badass by pushing the edge", but the actual edge being pushed is completely different - in one case fictional violence, and in the other case social norms. I hate to cite a wiki, but the connotation of edgelord as a person who says offensive things to make themselves feel cool has at least enough traction to have gotten a wiktionary page; calling it the wrong idea seems, well, wrong. This Reddit thread features people who come to similar conclusions; the term edgelord is obviously derived from the concept of edginess, but it's applied to real people who behave in deliberately offensive ways rather than just wannabe-badass violent fictional characters.

rmsgrey wrote:I thought it was the result of disturbing saturated air, causing the water vapor already present to condense out.

I did recently have the privilege of watching that happen, not at the wingtip but at the outer end of the deployed trailing edge flap during landing. It was close enough for me to see the vortex shape in its first ~1 to 2 twists, and rather interesting.

"... and airliners, with whatever that stuff is that they spray out that lingers in the air for however long ...""Contrails? That's just water.""Water?""Yes. They burn hydrocarbons and make CO2 and H2O, water, which cools down and condenses into clouds.""Oh."

Sometimes, it works.

And here I thought it was the result of disturbing saturated air, causing the water vapor already present to condense out.

Apparently it's both.

Huh, I'm kind of surprised by that. I'd only seen pictures of contrails forming at wingtips, and thought as did rmsgrey. But lo and behold, no paucity whatsoever of airliners clearly leaving trails originating some dozen or so meters behind each engine. I'm guessing high-bypass liners and bombledores produce a lot of vapor from their engines whilst fighters don't burn as completely, producing less water, but sending those pointy-arse wingtips ripping through the air quite a bit more harshly, causing no small amount of condensing vorticity.

"That big tube down the side was officially called a "systems tunnel", which is aerospace contractor speak for "big tube down the side."

The contrail CT must have started in California or some other place without winters. in every place where it gets cold sometimes, we can all see the condensing vapours streaming from every car tailpipe.And it's pretty cold up there at the cruising altitude of airplanes.

(Much as per Sableagle, I suppose, ) I last year¹ saw various planes descending along an approach-slope towards an airport² and they clearly passed through an unvapoury vapour-layer, at which point each would (in each's own turn at the passage) sport prominent vapour-vortices, much as per the archive shots of airlines landing through an artificial 'mist wall' intended to indicate the violence and persistence of the swirls. Only this was a horizontal plane (NPI!) being descenced through rather than a vertical one attacked face-on.

The weather left this layer just enough on the edge of the vapour-point, obviously, to tip over in the disturbance without being a cloud-layer otherwise. And the pattern faded away (far in advance of its apparent motion ceasing) between each transit. A salutory lesson for a light-plane pilot, I'm sure, had they been sneaking up upon these often jumboesque airliners. (Though ATC would probably already be having words with such a person, I'm sure.)

See also the "moth back fuzz" of a tightly-pitching jet aircraft at an airshow, clearly away from the engines and due to (inverse?) pressure-pockets.

(@Speising: I think it's more the bit where the wingtip contrails of a high-flying jet seem disassociated with the craft body, before ballooning out, seemingly indicates that maybe trailing pipes such as from air-to-air refuellers are being used to project the Agent Whatever. I'm no stranger to cooling towers, but there it just seems to rise up, but without the nouse to comprehend the effects of the airflow it doesn't seem to be passively coming from the engines or anything (as, indeed, those outer trails do no) so clearly the liquid from the special hidden tanks is being dispersed through special hidden nozzles. One might say.)

¹ I can tell you the date, as well as the location, as I recall the journey I was in the midst of. Not useful, I imagine, but there you go.² Or, for all I knew, a very crowded supermarket carpark (by the end). But it was definitely in the direction of a major airport, so I'll presume my first description is correct despite them going quickly out of sight over the local horizon.

Soupspoon wrote:(Much as per Sableagle, I suppose, ) I last year¹ saw various planes descending along an approach-slope towards an airport² and they clearly passed through an unvapoury vapour-layer, at which point each would (in each's own turn at the passage) sport prominent vapour-vortices, much as per the archive shots of airlines landing through an artificial 'mist wall' intended to indicate the violence and persistence of the swirls. Only this was a horizontal plane (NPI!) being descenced through rather than a vertical one attacked face-on.

The weather left this layer just enough on the edge of the vapour-point, obviously, to tip over in the disturbance without being a cloud-layer otherwise. And the pattern faded away (far in advance of its apparent motion ceasing) between each transit. A salutory lesson for a light-plane pilot, I'm sure, had they been sneaking up upon these often jumboesque airliners. (Though ATC would probably already be having words with such a person, I'm sure.)

See also the "moth back fuzz" of a tightly-pitching jet aircraft at an airshow, clearly away from the engines and due to (inverse?) pressure-pockets.

(@Speising: I think it's more the bit where the wingtip contrails of a high-flying jet seem disassociated with the craft body, before ballooning out, seemingly indicates that maybe trailing pipes such as from air-to-air refuellers are being used to project the Agent Whatever. I'm no stranger to cooling towers, but there it just seems to rise up, but without the nouse to comprehend the effects of the airflow it doesn't seem to be passively coming from the engines or anything (as, indeed, those outer trails do no) so clearly the liquid from the special hidden tanks is being dispersed through special hidden nozzles. One might say.)

¹ I can tell you the date, as well as the location, as I recall the journey I was in the midst of. Not useful, I imagine, but there you go.² Or, for all I knew, a very crowded supermarket carpark (by the end). But it was definitely in the direction of a major airport, so I'll presume my first description is correct despite them going quickly out of sight over the local horizon.

You really need to use fewer parenthesis, this is is out of control. If it doesn't belong in the sentence, why put it there? If it does belong, why not put it there properly?

sotanaht wrote:You really need to use fewer parenthesis, this is is out of control. If it doesn't belong in the sentence, why put it there? If it does belong, why not put it there properly?

Assuming you realise the irony of making that unexpurgated quote, I'll just put it to you that perhaps I could have broken some of it out into more feetnete, but I'd probably get questions about that, too. I may indeed yet do about the ones I did.

Spoiler:

The only really gratuitous break-out was the 'lead in', inserted to indicate that Archgeek's intervening post was not the one I was responding to. Which I wrote so it could lead onto the original sentence start with the compulsarily capitalised "I" or be ignored. Maybe I could have used em-dashed sub-clausing, but that leaves slightly more ambiguity of purpose than comma-clausing and would probably just have been a hyphen/minus.

I was worried I might have invoked your ire with nested parentheses. Though they can at least nest I see I only did it once. The edited-before-posting secondary aside to Speising was contained to indicate its afterthought of addition, and contained a small aside of its own. For which I apologise. Maybe a few more linefeeds and/or a horizontal rule could have created the same effect, or just Italicise that whole para. Except for the one word I had actually emphasised in the extant example, under this alternatwe regime.

These things and more went through my head. Including which parts might be just omitted entirely. But I found that all that I did not actually remove, that you have therefore not even seen, reflected what I wanted to say. Whether factual, conjectural or flavourful attempts at humour for which I am loathe to apologise as it's what stops it from being merely sterile and technical.

I appreciate my writing style isn't everyone's cup of tea, but I think more about what I tap out than some people think. Or is it that I think too much whilst doing so? It's a conundrum with no clear answer.

Please note that I've deliberately avoided any ()s, above. It's made some things wordier amd stocatto than they really need be. And I'd have replied in private if you'd have commented in private and thus saved others additional headaches beyond what maybe they had anyway. As a compromise, the meat of the response is now hidden in here.

"salt" in what sense? Because "salty" to mean angry or irritated is most of a century older than 4chan..

Interesting. Before it started appearing recently in forums and Facebook and whatnot meaning "angry", I've only encountered it as referring to language - particularly expletive-laden speech being "salty", as a reference to sailors who are apparently renowned for swearing heavily.